Published in Scientific Bulletin. Series F. Biotechnologies, Vol. XIX
Written by Devarajan THANGADURAI, Manjunath KUMBAR, Jeyabalan SANGEETHA, Abhishek MUNDARAGI
This is the most comprehensive study to present the genetic diversity available in populations of eggplant cultivars using molecular markers. An attempt was made to analyze genetic variability among twelve eggplant cultivars by Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) techniques using twenty random primers. Among the twenty RAPD primers used, OPA-04, OPA-07, OPA-14 and OPA-20 primers gave the best positive results with all twelve egg plant cultivars and bands generated showed a higher level of polymorphism. This reveals a very narrow genetic base of the different collections and the results also indicate that all the populations show more than 80% similarity irrespective of their flower colour and other morphological features. POPGENE software was used for the population genetic analysis, each band produced was treated as a locus and variations among the alleles were calculated. The RAPD markers used in the present study were able to differentiate the genetic diversity in the eggplant cultivars. The genetic diversity of eggplant cultivars was revealed by percentage of polymorphic loci. Dendrogram based on Nei’s (1972) genetic distance using Unweighted Pair Group Method of Arithmetic Means (UPGMA) indicated in the present study shows the segregation of twelve cultivars of eggplant into three main clusters: five entries were grouped into cluster 1, four entries were grouped into cluster 2 and remaining three entries were grouped into cluster 3. The results of RAPD showed that there appears a need to take individuals from more different populations so as to preserve their diversity for the future. The study also confirms the suitability of RAPD as a reliable, simple, easy to handle and elegant tool in molecular diagnosis of different accessions of an important vegetable plant like eggplant.
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